Like most blacks in the segregated South of 1963, James Jackson could have cited plenty of reasons when he got up early on Aug. 28, took off work in the middle of the week and drove north from James City County to march in a landmark civil rights protest in Washington, D.C.

But 50 years after he started off in a car with several other men, the racially divided schools, hospitals, stores and neighborhoods of the era are not the first or the only things he remembers.

For most of his life, the bell captain at the Williamsburg Inn had lived in a world where almost every white person he encountered looked past or through him as if his black skin made him something less than human.

Even those who had known him long — like the white lady for whom he did odd jobs — expected him to use the back door in the white neighborhoods where he and his family had no hope of living.

Just as sharp as the sting inflicted by years of racial insults, however, was the sense of obligation that made him want to stand up and march for those who had faced a darker injustice many years before him.

"I was the grandson of a slave," says Jackson, now 86.

"And I thought it was the correct thing to do."

Along with his companions from West Point and New Kent, Jackson was among an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people who clogged the roads leading to D.C. for the historic "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom."

Organized by a fractious coalition of labor unions, religious organizations and civil rights groups, the demonstration had been long in the planning but was only expected to draw about 100,000 marchers.

Yet caravan after caravan of buses arrived from all across the Midwest and Northeast, as far west as St. Louis and Little Rock and as far south as Birmingham, Ala., joined by thousands of smaller groups who converged on Washington by rail and car.

Hampton University librarian Frank Edgcombe was then a British-born college student who loved the American dream so much that he immigrated, then toiled to make that vision come true for the disenfranchised and the disadvantaged.

He left from New York City about 4 or 5 a.m., joining a vast column of vehicles that included 450 buses from Harlem alone. Thousands of other New Yorkers departed from Union Station aboard 20 chartered trains, the Associated Press reported.

Edgcombe and the other members of the multicultural congregation at Faith Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church near Lincoln Center in Manhattan were already experienced civil rights veterans.

But none of them expected what they saw when the sun finally rose on their rented school bus and they could see out the windows.

"There were literally hundreds of buses — many of them covered with placards and banners — and they stretched for miles," says Edgcombe, who moved to the Peninsula in 1978.

"After a while they took over some of the lanes on the turnpike. I don't think anybody had a clue that it would be so huge."

Thousands of other buses and cars joined them in the jam-packed staging area, where harried organizers handed out buttons and signs, then briefed the marchers on how to respond to heckling, physical assault and tear gas.

So slowly did these unexpected legions fall into line that the march quickly fell behind schedule. According to an AP writer at the scene, the small group of demonstrators gathered on the Mall at 8:30 a.m. were outnumbered by reporters.

As the morning wore on, however, the mass of people swelled in a way that no one had imagined.

Working as an advance man for Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Phoebus-born Rudy Langford had already been in Washington for a month and had finished his job when the march started.

But 50 years later he still remembers his surprise as he looked on from 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue at the army of demonstrators that had assembled.

"I knew there would be a lot of people. I had been with King in Washington before and seen thousands of people come out," the Hampton resident recalls.

"But I was really amazed at how many people walked by me — at how excited they were — and how it was not just black people but white people — old folks and young folks — rich folks and poor folks — Asians and Jews — all kinds of people all mixed together.

"What it showed is that this wasn't just a black movement. It was something that had aroused the conscience of the whole nation."

Among the aroused was Anne Mason, then 26, who had come from Princeton, N.J., as a member of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity.

Leaving her two small children in her church's care, she'd set out at 5:30 a.m. after eating only an apple and a peanut butter sandwich. But when she and her then husband — an Episcopal priest — had discovered there was a bus going to Washington, there was no question about making the trip.

"A lot of us didn't know the extent of the misery that people were experiencing in this country because of the color of their skin before the movement started," says Mason, who moved to Newport News in 1999.

"But once we did, we were determined that what we thought was wrong needed to be addressed."

Mason and Edgcombe were among the first to arrive at the Lincoln Memorial, where they took up positions in front of the reflecting pool within a tightly packed throng of marchers.

Jackson recalls standing shoulder to shoulder and breast to breast, too, in a crowd that connected many blacks and whites in a way they had seldom experienced before.

"I was amazed to see so many white people there — and especially white ladies who had come by themselves. I didn't think they would care," he recalls.

"But they looked at me like I was a human being. They talked to me like I was a human being. I was a boy from the South, and it was something I wasn't used to."

Though many speakers took the podium to address the marchers, it wasn't until King appeared at the day's end that the patient, attentive crowd pressed forward, Jackson says.

In the 16-minute oration that followed, the charismatic preacher delivered a sweeping, visionary sermon on America that enthralled his listeners and was quickly recognized as a defining moment of the civil rights era.

Jackson still chokes up when he talks about King's words 50 years later.

Mason calls the speech "prophetic" — then describes the feeling in the multitude of people looking on as what one might expect in a place visited by a "holy spirit."

"It was palpable. You could feel his vision go right through the crowd," she says, "and it made you want to go home and do something that would help make it happen."

Edgcombe felt the power of King's eloquence, too, describing it as the march's "culminating moment."

"It was obvious from the beginning that he was a preacher and not a labor leader," the librarian says.

For Langford, it was not the best of the many addresses he'd heard King deliver.

But it still ranked among his most dynamic, he says, and it affected his listeners in both Washington and on television across the country so indelibly that it made King into a "second Moses."

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, President Barack Obama is joined by former President Bill Clinton, dignitaries, celebrities and ordinary citizens to commemorate the events in Washington, D.C.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the veteran civil rights activist, urged the country to remember and build on the progress of the last five decades during a speech at the 50th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington.